April 12, 2008

Few of the press accounts of Obama getting caught telling San Francisco supporters what they wanted to hear about why those Pennsylvanians have such retrograde values, like religion, mention where exactly in San Francisco he was. It appears most likely that he was at a fundraiser in Gordon Getty's mansion on Billionaire's Row, a street where Larry Ellison and a number of other Forbes 400 folks live. Getty is the chief heir of the J. Paul Getty's vast oil fortune. (On a side note, the name "Gordon Getty" was the inspiration for the name of Michael Douglas's "Greed is good" character in "Wall Street:" "Gordon Gekko," although Gekko's personality is closer to J. Paul's than Gordon's, a dilettante symphony composer.)

Here are a lot of pictures of Obama arriving at Getty's mansion from Zombie Times.

Obama was taped saying:

"You go into some of these small towns in Pennsylvania, and like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing's replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not. And it's not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations."

This is a perfect summary of Stuff White People Hate.

P.S. Other sources suggest the "cling to guns" remark was made at a fundraiser in Marin County, which is probably even worse from a P.R. standpoint.

By the way, if Obama wants to know why guys who "cling to guns" like guns, it's because they really, really, really like guns and/or hunting.

This story has legs. Google News now links 1,480 stories mentioning the matter.

It's one of those things which taken on its own means little, but added to his Rezko problem, his wife's $200,000 pay raise, his far left radical parents and grandparents and, of course, the Jeremiah Wright scandal, paints an unflattering picture of the man. At some point the effect becomes exponential, not additive.

Starting to notice a pattern here? The last 5 inherited their fortunes, and of those 4 are Democrats (Jewett plays both sides of the aisle, as does Ellison, who earned his fortune).

At a campaign rally defending his comments, Obama stated that what "bitter" small-town Americans were worried about was that "nobody is looking out for them."

Indeed. Since he mentioned it, I wonder: how much of whatever money these leftwing billioanire Obama fans give - or, often more precisely, DIRECT - to charity finds its way to places like Scranton and Allentown and other small towns across America.

When Andrew Carnegie gave away his fortune he gave it away to Americans, building libraries in hundreds of towns across America, most in places where he had never been. Of the 2,509 libraries he built, 67% were in the USA while most of the rest were in the "Anglosphere": Britain, Ireland, Canada, New Zealand & Australia.

This all happened before leftists unrelated to the man hijacked his foundation for their own purposes.

Visit the website of the Getty Foundation, on the other hand, and what you'll find is that most of the money is spent in big cities or else abroad. Getty is far more likely to spend money in foreign cities than in small American cities and towns.

I'd be more likely to believe that Obama would look after Americans if his rich friends were already doing so with their inherited wealth. They're not, and Obama won't. He's more interested in taking dollars out of our wallets for his pet causes than in making sure we can keep paying the bills.

The fundraiser at the Getty home was one of 3 that Obama held in the San Francisco area on the same day. Another was at the home of Sohaib & Sara Abbasi. Abbasi is a Muslim, a Pakistani immigrant, and a descendant of the uncle of Mohammed (the Abbasid Dynasty was one of the most powerful in the Islamic world for 500 years).

He was a 21 year employee and executive at Oracle Corporation. The Wikipedia entry on him notes that following 9/11 he gave several million to Stanford's Islamic Studies program.

Aside from "Islamic Studies," virtually all of the Abbasi's charitable activities are directed towards Pakistan, where they have helped to build over 200 schools.

In other words, Obama's biggest supporters, and just about the only ones he'll pay any attention to after his election, are firmly ensconced in the category of "post-Americans." Obama can speak on end about the concerns of "bitter," smalltown Americans, but it's quite clear he couldn't care less about their welfare.

" And it's not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations."

Funny, that sounds like something a free-trade proponent would say. Most likely, this will cause a minor brouhaha about elitism then it will blow over, helped by the Obama fans in the media. However, if the Clinton team was smart (a big If I know) they'd use this incident to hammer him on free trade. Obama's stand against free trade seems weaker and weaker every time he gives a speech.

If the jobs that liberals do: teachers, reporters, attorneys, social workers, media, web-related work, et cetera were all being outsourced or suffering from tons of insourcing, NO ONE WOULD GRIPE MORE.

Not everybody, Barak Obama, can be a "community organizer" who recieved a private school education because of his white momma and her generous parents.

Dammit, I hate....literally HATE, all three people left running for president.

The Zombie Times article is great, especially the bit where he mocks Obama's pretensions to social change, whilst pandering to the traditional interests of the uber-rich and the traditional grievances of the unter-poor.

Liberal democracy is a phenomonon of the civic-minded bourgeois class. The middle class acts as a bridge for the dregs and a brake on the cream.

Barak tends to appeal to the tails of the SES distribution, financial class and biological race. That rings all kinds of alarm bells in those who hanker for bougeois democratic populism.

The irony here is that all of the most bitter people I know are solidly in the Demcratic column: my retired union-member uncle and his former air traffic controller buddy who's still pissed at Reagan for firing all the striking controllers.

They're the folks who feel they're owed a handout.

The people who vote on the basis of religious issues, gun rights, and immigration are people perfectly willing to work hard - they just don't want the system stacked against them.

And if Democrats like Obama truly feel that these issues are just trifles used as distractions by Republicans to fool a few rubes* then why don't they change their positions? If immigration enforcement is so irrelevant next to more important matters like universal health care, then become a born-again enforcer and neutralize the GOP advantage.

The Democrats won't do that, of course, because they know that the issues do matter.

* In some cases they certainly are - if I ever find a person who chooses his candidate based on their opposition to flag burning I will surely kick his ass. Yes, some Republicans utilize these issues as distractions - but that's not at all unlike the Democrats who purport to care for the working man while caring for him not at all.

A commenter at Confederate Yankee has a heretical take on the benighted denizens of small town PA: http://confederateyankee.mu.nu/archives/259988.php

I happen to LIKE people like that. Exactly like that, in fact, except they're NOT as Sen. Obama described. They don't "cling" to their religion, or guns. Those things are just part of who they are, and I can tell you from personal experience that who they are are damn fine people. Chambersburg, PA comes easily to mind.

I'm a concert photographer, but I also know a bit about fire departments, and the volunteer dept. there runs a concert as a fund raiser. I can say honestly I have never seen a better run concert, or a more shaped up volunteer fire department ANYWHERE. Just superb. New, state of the art apparatus, and equipment, and everybody knew their job. Smooth as silk.

Same thing in Meshoppen, PA at the Kiwanis Wyoming County fair. Or the re-opened for tourists coal mine I stopped at, and took a tour of on the way back to CT. The retired miner who led the tour deep inside the mine was fascinating. I learned more history, geology, chemistry, engineering, and sociology in an hour and a half than I had since college.

Those people weren't bitter, or frustrated either. Instead, they turned an old, abandoned mine into a first rate tourist attraction. Not some Disney re-creation, a real, working coal mine.

Those people were not looking for outsiders to string up, or someone to blame. What vile, stupid, ignorant things for Sen. Obama to say. And how dumb of him to think no one would hear. Not too bright.

It's an interesting issue you guys raise here. (I know, typical liberal thing to say.) The guy doesn't seem to have a lot of empathy for small-town people, though I'm not sure he's totally unsympathetic; the important thing is what he does when he's in office. Personally, I think the Democrats are better in times of recession because their palest-shade-of-pink redistributionism tends to put more money in the hands of the poor, who will then spend it; the Bush years have given us a boom that produced no jobs.

Bizarrely enough, even stocks actually do better during Democratic administrations. I couldn't believe it either but it is true. Google it if you don't believe me.

Of course, by 'guns and religion' he means the whole red-state belief complex of conservative Christianity, patriotism, traditional family roles, rural pastimes, etc., which you can oppose to the antonymous stereotype of single women in their 20s working at advertising agencies with serial boyfriends, or perhaps the Cambridge/Ann Arbor/Austin/Berkeley (I got one from all four demographic regions!) hippie. (I've always been soft on hippies: they're willing to date nerds for some reason. Can't figure it out but there it is.)

Kissing a millionaire's ass doesn't always involve kicking a poor man's ass, it's just an obvious contrast that tends to stick in your mind when you notice it. As for small towns, while many may be struggling, the Senate and the electoral college give many rural states extra power out of proportion to their population, effectively meaning that the people in those states 'count more'. That's why we always hear about farm trouble than about long commutes in suburbs and cities.

Immigration, borders, etc: Look, we lost on this one. I'm in favor of a wall but it's not going to happen with any of these guys; the Democrats want votes and the Republicans want cheap labor. At some point you have to ask what matters to you, and that's where I split with most of the people here.

Oh, and Vorenus: go find me Tom DeLay's neighbors, please. I bet you they're almost as loaded. Rich people like to own an apartment in New York, even if they're Republicans. Remember these guys have multiple residences. You can only say they're liberals if they raise a family there. ;)

Can Obama pass the test? What these billionaires have in mind is the following: "If Obama can keep BOTH the black and brown hordes AND the white mobs in check then have we got a deal!"

Hilary is in trouble.

As for Mccain (basically, a Bush Jr with a madder streak posing as a likeable old geezer like Reagan), he's the neocons and billionaires'replacement in case foreign action gets more pressing than domestic unrest. Obama will be elected if demagogy becomes more urgent than war-making.

The only one whose bitter is Barack Obama, whose now taking out his frustrations on the same socially conservative middle class white electorate amongst whom his dwindling campaign needs at least some support to win.

William:The irony here is that all of the most bitter people I know are solidly in the Demcratic column: my retired union-member uncle and his former air traffic controller buddy who's still pissed at Reagan for firing all the striking controllers. They're the folks who feel they're owed a handout.

In re: Obama [as the deliverer of the remarks in the first place], Sigmund Freud called this Projection.

I confused. Obama is telling his supporters that small town conservatives have good reason to be angry at the way they've been treated by Democrats. Obama is scolding Democrats for not catering to the needs of these people.

Why is Obama getting in trouble for this? The right-wing noise machine is desparate for material.

William:The fundraiser at the Getty home was one of 3 that Obama held in the San Francisco area on the same day. Another was at the home of Sohaib & Sara Abbasi. Abbasi is a Muslim, a Pakistani immigrant, and a descendant of the uncle of Mohammed (the Abbasid Dynasty was one of the most powerful in the Islamic world for 500 years). He was a 21 year employee and executive at Oracle Corporation. The Wikipedia entry on him notes that following 9/11 he gave several million to Stanford's Islamic Studies program. Aside from "Islamic Studies," virtually all of the Abbasi's charitable activities are directed towards Pakistan, where they have helped to build over 200 schools.

Yeah, I saw that name yesterday and put its investigation on my To-Do List.

Between his polygamous Muslim father in Kenya, his childhood in the Madrassas with his Indonesian step-father, his seeking out of Edward Said at Columbia, his 20-year relationship with his ex-Muslim "God damn America" minister [who, in turn, is in bed with the likes of Qaddafi and Farrakhan], and his bizarrely over-enthusiastic support for the candidacy of Raul Amolo "Sharia Law" Odinga [son of the Obama family comrade-in-arms, Jaramogi Oginga Odinga], Obama's ostensibly tenuous relationship with dar al-Islam is starting to make Hillary Clinton & Huma Abedin look like rank amateurs.

I know many are shocked that someone running for president would dare to try to raise money from rich people, but in regards to Obama's description of small towns, it seems spot on.

And I say that as someone whose family hailed from a wide spot in the road in Kansas, who worked summers at a river town near the bootheel of Missouri, and who worked for three years on a rural assistance program in Texas.

There are countless hopeless failed small towns in America that fit this description. They are filled with people who by and large lead miserable lives. Sure, there's always some core of old money in those towns, and they live fairly well. But the mainstream of all of them are victimized by terrible schools, lack of real economic opportunity, and -sorry!- cultures and attitudes that tend toward superstition, zealotry and bigotry.

Obama is speaking the truth and of course nothing gets a politician in trouble faster!

Maybe they cling to guns because they dont want a pack of "people who dont look like them" breaking into their house and robbing,raping/murdering and dismembering them! Oh,I forgot.Dear Barry is soooo upset about the young children from Jena,so brutally oppressed for their trivial offenses,maybe he wouldnt be too sympathetic. But who needs sympathy from a president? We want them tough and dispassionate like,uhm,W. :)

"William said...And if Democrats like Obama truly feel that these issues are just trifles used as distractions by Republicans to fool a few rubes* then why don't they change their positions? If immigration enforcement is so irrelevant next to more important matters like universal health care, then become a born-again enforcer and neutralize the GOP advantage."

Yes! Exactly right. When liberals carp about how middle-americans vote on the basis of abortion, gay marriage, immigration, or gun control, they betray a brazen contempt for the rest of us. As if these matters were of no import. As if it were a matter of supreme indifference whether gays can marry, or guns remain legal, or our nation is inundated by foreigners. In so doing they, in effect, say: "You are stupid people, who have no conception of what is good or bad for you. What you consider to be important is unimportant". And these self-righteous liberal swine consider themselves to be tribunes of the people.

There is PC of the left and PC of the right. Ferraro fell afoul of the former when she had the bad taste to point out that HRC and BHO would not be viable presidential candidates if not for their sex and race. Obama has fallen afoul of the latter by pointing out the inconvenient fact that working-class white bitterness is easily manipulated by the demagogues of the right, religious or otherwise.

That's not to say that those small-town Pennsylvanians aren't sincere in their faith or their support for the Second Amendment. Rather, Obama's point is that, despite decades of economic hardship - to the point where many of these depressing* places have dropped out of the mainstream of American life - their anger is spent on moral issues (and gun control) that have no effect at all on the things that have caused their economic ruination. That includes immigration, by the way, since these towns have been dying since long before the current flood.

It was tactless for Obama to say this in so many words, and it was dumb to say it in such a luxe setting, but it's still true.

Liberal democracy is a phenomonon of the civic-minded bourgeois class. The middle class acts as a bridge for the dregs and a brake on the cream.

Barak tends to appeal to the tails of the SES distribution, financial class and biological race. That rings all kinds of alarm bells in those who hanker for bougeois democratic populism.

You are way too generous in your definition of "bourgeois." At most, the bourgeoisie includes people at or above the 50th percentile in income and education. Working-class people are not, by definition, part of it. Populism is not a bourgeois phenomenon, and the people who are flocking to Obama are very much part of the bourgeoisie.

*There are gorgeous rural areas in Pennsylvania, and some quite pleasant little towns, especially in the southeast, but the former coal-mining and industrial towns are grim. They suffer not only from economic stagnation but from brain-drain, so that the people who remain in them tend to be either very old or lacking in the brains, ambition and talent to go elsewhere. That makes it hard to stop the downward spiral.

Obama is right. These "small town" white folk, who conservatives praise, are almost always the most close-minded people you could ever meet. I don't see what the big deal is about what he said.

Just for the purposes of argument, let's say the big deal is the fact that he wouldn't talk that way about the far more common black underclass that way, that no one does, etc. Or that you probably don't even get what I'm talking about.

By the way, if Obama wants to know why guys who "cling to guns" like guns, it's because they really, really, really like guns and/or hunting.

Ace at Ace of Spades HQ pointed out the left's addiction to Marxist-style "false consciousness" explanations for the behaviors of anyone who isn't a leftist themselves.

If you like guns, then you're being snookered by the corporations. If you oppose abortion, you're being bamboozled, hookwinked (as Barry X might say) by Big Business. By the same logic, if you oppose illegal immigration, you must be fooled by the xenophobic Wall Street Journal.

When liberals carp about how middle-americans vote on the basis of abortion, gay marriage, immigration, or gun control, they betray a brazen contempt for the rest of us. As if these matters were of no import. As if it were a matter of supreme indifference whether gays can marry, or guns remain legal, or our nation is inundated by foreigners. In so doing they, in effect, say: "You are stupid people, who have no conception of what is good or bad for you. What you consider to be important is unimportant". And these self-righteous liberal swine consider themselves to be tribunes of the people.

When conservatives carp about how Americans vote on the basis of poverty, health care, or discrimination, they betray a brazen contempt for the rest of us. As if these matters were of no import. As if it were a matter of supreme indifference whether people are starving, sick, or pushed into slums. In so doing they, in effect, say: "You are stupid people, who have no conception of what is good or bad for you. What you consider to be important is unimportant". And these self-righteous conservative swine consider themselves to be tribunes of the people.

When conservatives carp about how Americans vote on the basis of poverty, health care, or discrimination, they betray a brazen contempt for the rest of us.

Conservatives believe that many people are poor on account of lack of ability or effort. Liberals seem to feel otherwise. Conservatives are skeptical of the notion that the government knows better than the individual how the individual should spend his money on health care and other things. They also worry about the cost to the nation as a whole in correcting these problems. Liberals don't even want to reflect upon that cost. Conservatives question whether the government is morally right in telling the employer who they should or should not hire. Liberals don't care about the rights of the employer.

As if these matters were of no import. As if it were a matter of supreme indifference whether people are starving, sick, or pushed into slums.

In not being indifferent to these things, the left is instead indifferent to the rights, responsibilities, and capabilities of individuals. What is worse, leftists are supremely indifferent to the consequences of their policies. When an intervention appears successful, they call for further interventions. When an intervention appears unsuccessful, they call for further interventions.

In so doing they, in effect, say: "You are stupid people, who have no conception of what is good or bad for you. What you consider to be important is unimportant".

No, that would be the left. It's the left that thinks it knows better than the individual what is good for the individual. The right is usually (though, admittedly, not always) less presumptuous.

And these self-righteous conservative swine consider themselves to be tribunes of the people.

Conservatives tend see themselves as being tribunes of individual rights or national interests rather than the interests of masses. "Tribunes of the people" is a more adequate description of the left than the right. The right tends to think in terms of the good of the individual and the good of nations, the left in terms of the good of masses and the good of utopian daydreams.

"When conservatives carp about how Americans vote on the basis of poverty, health care, or discrimination, they betray a brazen contempt for the rest of us"

I've never heard a conservative utter these words or any like them. Visit Lawrence Auster's site "View from the Right" (post "Why liberals are ignorant of conservatism" to find out why you don't understand us (conservatives simply don't utter or think what you think we think), but we understand you. It's just philosophical and not a bash fest. Actually, Tommy's post was pretty good.

When conservatives carp about how Americans vote on the basis of poverty, health care, or discrimination, they betray a brazen contempt for the rest of us."

My disagreement with you is probably not as strong as you think. You are mistaking "conservatives" for "republicans". Not at all the same thing. The republican party does not seek power in order to stand for conservative principals. It - occasionally, and now less and less - espouses a few conservative positions in order to achieve power.

I'm as tired of the republican party elite shoving free-trade and their mystical theology of markets down my throat as I imagine you are. When it comes to poverty and racism we probably differ. We've been throwing money at the poor for 40 years and in so doing have only created more of them. Poverty in modern societies like ours has much more to do with poverty of morals than of means. And when it comes to racism: our society is now officially anti-white, not anti-black or anti-other-of-any-kind.

I'm as tired of the republican party elite shoving free-trade and their mystical theology of markets down my throat as I imagine you are. When it comes to poverty and racism we probably differ. We've been throwing money at the poor for 40 years and in so doing have only created more of them. Poverty in modern societies like ours has much more to do with poverty of morals than of means. And when it comes to racism: our society is now officially anti-white, not anti-black or anti-other-of-any-kind.Y'know, this is what pisses me off. I think a profitable alliance could be made between the populist Left and populist Right against the corporations, but we can't get past the race issue. So we're just going to keep sniping at each other while our jobs get immigrated and outsourced away.

...Just how the MP3-wielding Fowler managed to secure an invite to the $1,000 a head fundraiser at the San Francisco home of developer Alex Mehran wasn't immediately clear - but Obama campaign higher-ups were said to be livid, with fingers pointing at a local fundraising consultant for the slip-up...

However, it wouldn't surprise me if that were disinformation in and of itself - this stuff with the Gettys & Billionaires' Row is toxic, which is why everyone in the MSM refuses to mention it.

Mayhill Fowler doesn't mention the "Mehran" name in either of her pieces:

Y'know, this is what pisses me off. I think a profitable alliance could be made between the populist Left and populist Right against the corporations, but we can't get past the race issue. So we're just going to keep sniping at each other while our jobs get immigrated and outsourced away."

Yeah, I guess you're right. And it is a shame. But as long as leftists maintain that I should subsidize the lazy, coddle the criminal, and tolerate the egregiously deviant, as long as they maintain that I am a bad person simply because I am a white man, and as long as they maintain that my traditional culture is nothing but crap, they can go screw themselves.

Yeah, I guess you're right. And it is a shame. But as long as leftists maintain that I should subsidize the lazy, coddle the criminal, and tolerate the egregiously deviant, as long as they maintain that I am a bad person simply because I am a white man, and as long as they maintain that my traditional culture is nothing but crap, they can go screw themselves.I actually used to post on lefty bulletin boards suggesting they dial down the identity politics and consider going soft on immigration because it was bad for workers, as well as making more Christian arguments for the welfare state (Jesus really does not seem like much of a Republican to me, honestly, when I read the Bible. Healing the sick? Apostles sharing all their stuff?). But after a while...well, I got tired of it. I still make arguments to my friends when I get the chance. But being in a blue state with no connections...

Yeah, you're right. It's too bad. I thought we had a chance with Perot but then he went off his meds.

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